Journal of the Plague Year 11

My friend informs me that now he has become more uncomfortable going out for psychological reasons than for health reasons. “This thing ruined me,” he sighs. I think to what he refers is that his experiences during the pandemic—the daily news reports of the growing incidence and deaths from the coronavirus, the mandate to wear masks everywhere, to maintain social distancing, the periodic and continual lock-downs, the complete and social isolation and seclusion for the past fifteen months established in him a level of caution, even paranoia, regarding the outside world that has not lessened now that the pandemic has begun to wane. He remains indoors and sequestered averse to venture out of his doors; he moves into the outside nervously and with trepidatious caution.

I do appreciate my friend’s concerns. Despite the news reporting the decline in pandemic cases and deaths, I am yet comfortable to remain secure in my home and continue to feel wary to venture out into the public world. I remain safe in here, I believe. Fully vaccinated, I do take my walks without my mask, but I still move away from anyone moving towards me from the opposite direction whether they are masked or not; I avoid public spaces and I will not yet go into a restaurant or movie theater though I sorely miss the latter and have sadly learned that three of my favorite theaters have permanently closed! I think I should purchase a large screen television but I don’t have a wall to place it against. I have avoided most enclosed spaces. Oh, indeed, the world has shrunk.

But I think it is more than the world that has shrunk. We have shrunk; our expectations have shrunk. How will we begin to know the psychological effects/damage we have suffered as a result of the experience of this recent pandemic? I was born just after the last serious polio epidemic and was part of the test cases for the Salk Polio Vaccine. I must have been seven years old in 1954 and in the first or second grade. Perhaps my parents were brave to enter me in the trials, or else they were very ill informed. We subsequently learned that I had received the dose of actual serum and not the placebo. The polio epidemic in the United States was at an end. But I was seven and I have no recollection of the threat at all, and my knowledge of the epidemic comes wholly from Philip Roth’s final novel Nemesis. But of course, the failure of details is no indication that I do not remember: Jeanette Winterson remarks that our neurotic states remember, our bodies remember. But we don’t remember! Deep in my psyche suspicion might still rest.

Today as the threat of the coronavirus wanes the world attempts to return to the way things existed before the current pandemic. And too many people behave as if the past fifteen months have not occurred. Or so it would seem. Restaurants are serving food and drinks indoors to unmasked and supposedly vaccinated customers; when the weather permits people sit outdoors unmasked drinking and eating; movie theaters are opening; and stores begin to admit unmasked but fully vaccinatedcustomers. The latter is based on the honor system, and since 74,000,000 people voted for Donald Trump and 63% of the Republicans still believe The Big Lie that the election was stolen, I have very, very little expectation that the people in the stores are without threat. Airlines have stopped serving on-board liquor as a result of violence to the flight attendants from passengers who refuse the mask mandate. My sense of distrust and fear continues to deepen.

There are children who have not been outside without a mask for the past fifteen months. What will be the effect on them of this practice? For fifteen months these children have been isolated from their peers; not been to school but constrained to be educated via computer at home; not been away from their parents for fifteen months! How might this ever-presence have affected their relationships to their parents, to siblings and peers? And, indeed, what about the parents who have not had relief away from their children for the whole fifteen months. How have their lives been dramatically and permanently changed by the experience of the pandemic.

I have grown up with concerns of smog, air pollution, climate change. The air I have breathed I saw to be visibly despoiled. But now that same air carries an unseeable threat and every Other has become a potential danger. In The Plague Tarrou says “I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace . . . What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.” There is no end to the pandemic, really, and no return to an older normal. I think we must learn anew how to live with this understanding and then how to live.